A Peoples' History of Requa, the Unfolding Saga

CCC Motto:  Everyone writes every day. Robert Berkhardt

Enjoy every moment … and keep writing…one word after the other until you are back where you began and see the place, for real, for the first time.  Patrick Couch

(The writing below follows on from a conversation that several of us were having at the DNC Alumni site.  I hope it is the beginning of a longer journey: after all, even a journey of a 1,000 miles begins with the first step, as Patrick would say.)

    So I have semi-settled in Thailand, and it’s a good time to pick up the story I began  telling you just before I boarded a plane in San Francisco to begin a twenty hour flight to Bangkok, Thailand.  Now, I’m actually sitting in a breezeway between the parts of a traditional Thai house where I’m staying; it’s simple to the point of being primitive, cheaply made, but beautiful.  The house rests on a concrete platform supported by wooden pillars, above a fishpond, which provides cover for the fish and feeds the surrounding rice fields, though the fields are dry and fallow now.  But hopefully after the upcoming week-long festival designed to please the water gods, the rain will come and the rice will be planted in May.  The festival is called Songkran.  The rituals and dances enacted to bring back and renew connections to the land, to time, to the eternal in time.   In truth, if the electricity was turned off here, the effect would be to turn back the calendar five thousand years.  It just wouldn’t make all that much difference.  The people in this farming community live lightly on the land.  They make their own charcoal to cook with.  They are Buddhist, for whom the passing of time does not mean the same thing it does to westerners.  There are small shrines dotting the landscape everywhere, marking the places where the ashes of ancestors are buried, and making them present in the daily flow of time.  “Was” and “will be” are located here, in this time, in the eternal which contains all time for the Buddhist.   

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. Lao Tzu

            But before we get back to the story, I would like to suggest that we first circle up.  Imagine:   we are at the old center in its new location in cyber space.  Look for the spot where the Yuroks perform the Brush Dance, which is another ceremonial dance performed to bring us into the presence of the eternal.  To my mind the great English/ American poet T.S. Eliot captures the spirit and the universal intentions of traditional dancing in this brief passage from The Four Quartets:  “ At the still point of the turning world/ there the dance is/ and there is only the dance.”    

    Actually, by now, I have written quite a lot about the infamous beach fire down by the river.  But I find myself returning to the beginning again and again, as the process of writing itself suggests additional ways to cast the story, as new perceptions and meaning naturally impinge upon me.I’m finding that in revisiting this particular  incident, which came at such a crucial moment in the center’s development, has sparked off many links to other incident, events and ideas, to the little experiment in community building that took place up on top, at the hill’s first crest.   But then it’s the thing I love about the writing process, that sense of discovery as you go along, the new connections, the deeper questions and meanings that become visible in the changing light of time and experience.  And then there are issues of structure and form, which seem to shift and change as I go along; so you rewrite; let it sit; come back as a reader and have a look, and then go back to the rewrite, as I’m doing now, and the aspects of the composition change and demand further changes.  And then it’s not just me, or, like everyone else, I’m a sort of composite of the writers I’ve read; their words stick to me.  There is, also, a reservoir of memories and friends, like you, upon which our consciousness float in some mysterious way.   I suppose by now, at the age of 72, the library I carry around with me must be getting toward 64 gigs—well maybe 4.     So, for example, two writers have come into my presence to light the way at almost this very instance.  Hemingway tried to write using a minimum of words and images.  He said he just wanted to show us the tip of the iceberg, just enough to evoke the deeper levels of feelings that lie just below the surface of our consciousness as we experience wring with texture.

            As our stories emerge here I’m finding that in the process of thinking about them the beach fire is sort of like the tip of an iceberg; the story floats on our shared experiences.  And as I bring fragments of our story to the surface your memories will expand down and outward. And then the next writer, who happened along just a few moments ago, was Walt Whitman.  And in remembering The Leaves of Grass I found this connecting tissue:” If this song is not your song/ it is nothing or next to nothing. / it’s not is yours as good as mine its nothing or next to nothing.”   And now William Faulkner just popped up and sparked one good reason for writing this.  I’m not exactly sure how serious he was when he said writers just want you to know “Kilroy was here”.  For me, the center is Kilroy and I want the world to know we were here, don’t you.  Our struggle to change the correctional culture we inherited to a culture fit for youth development happened.  But it happened in a context, at a center, inside of a country.  We were hobbled by many of the same the tensions and contradictions: both professing democratic values, including social justice, simple fairness, and equal opportunities for all, while behaving at times in the most ant-democratic ways imaginable.  It was a grand thing to watch, this little experiment: learning how to listen to each other, even using the ancient talking stick as a way of connecting hearts and minds, to reach common ground, to find common cause and a commitment to just do better.   As I reflect back and begin to bring the memories forward piece by piece, our little village, which I think was a real melting pot simmering on the flames of a set of shared values, was a wonderful experiment in learning why and how democracy can actually work.  Yes.  I think our story is worth telling.  And if we don’t tell it, who will?

As for me, like Whitman:  I like being “both in the game and out of it/ watching and wondering.”

Okay, okay.  Let me recap what I was saying about the beach fire, which was accidentally set by a group of corpsmembers, who had gathered near the mouth of the Klamath River to camp and have a few beers in a safe place.  I mean what was the likelihood of being rudely awakened by members of the Klamath Volunteer Fire Department, a convict fire crew from our old center across the river, led by a CDF fire captain, the Del Norte County Sheriff’s department, and a number of “concerned” citizens who looked out their windows to discover the whole world ablaze?

    Fortunately, the fire didn’t jump the road; remember fires love wind and steep hills; it works like a chimney.   Pretty serious business: had it crossed the road, it might well have burned a number of homes to the ground, including the homes of our center director, Patrick Couch, and the current director of the CCC, David Muraki, who was then responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the Del Norte Center and the Backcountry Trails program, which he and Robert Burckhardt had founded four or five years before. 

    One can only imagine the shock and awe felt by these youngsters. In the end, statements were taken from the innocent offenders, and then they were rounded up and marched up the hill to the center, where they were “restricted to base” pending an investigation and subsequent disciplinary action.  Because of my responsibilities, including handling incidents like this one, I received a phone call about 5 am on what was to be a long Sunday.  But no:  I didn’t get in my car and drive 50 miles and fire the lot of them, which would have been the preferred action of some members of staff, members of the local community, and even a number of CCC members.  My god, they’ve brought discredit and shame to the CCC!  Off with their heads!!

    What I did do is set down with the “Corpsmember Disciplinary Handbook, which had been produced by corpsmembers and staff, under the leadership of Patrick and David. I found the document to be thoughtful; it covers everything from being late to work to insubordination. It lays out recommended consequences for first, second and third offenses (e.g., 1^st offense for failing room inspection: documentation, no more than a rating of “3” on the monthly performance evaluation under Room & Center Maintenance,  problem to be remedied by 6pm.  2^nd offense, performance contract specifying no further offenses in 30 days, nothing above a 2 on monthly evaluation under Room & Center Maintenance, and under Cooperation with Peers and Staff.  3^rd offense 2 week suspension without pay or termination, possible 2^nd chance after 30 days.  4^th offense termination, no exceptions, 2^nd chance not recommended. Or, what about threats of violence: first offense termination. )  Really very good:  transparency, clear, progressive, for the most part, somewhat democratic, the Corpsmember Advisory Board and the community were included in the process.  A method for changing the process was even laid out.  Very good.  Consistency and clear expectations were spelled out.  But, unbelievably, there was no mention of setting fires on public beaches and endangering lives of sleeping citizens.  Remarkable omission.

    In the years to follow I would use the manual to help corpsmembers gain a” useful” perspective, usually for the purpose of manipulating them:  “You know the Disciplinary Code calls for termination, and I think that would be fair.  But your supervisor somehow seems to see something in you, and he wants to continue working with you. He says you’re a strong worker and the crew is going to need you for a long list of killer fisheries projects this summer.  But I need something from you.  If I just suspend you for a week and you get into another jam, my ass will be on the line, my credibility will be damaged, and the two of us will have hurt the chances of the next guy trying to get a break.  You’ve got to look in my eyes and tell me that you will seriously work with our counselor Jim McQuillin and me on your alcohol and anger issues.  You’re going to sign a privacy waiver so Jim can talk to me—so we can work with you on getting beyond this nonsense.  Savvy me?   But in turn I promise you I won’t discuss anything you say to me with anyone else except you and Jim unless the commission of a crime is involved or the health and safety of others are at issue.  If you want to share what we’re working on with your supervisor, It’s up to you. I hope you will, but it’s your call.   Sound familiar to anyone hanging out around the new center in cyber space?  Ned, Mike, Todd, Patti-- how about you Paul S, Terrance.   Sometimes I actually hauled out the Bible I kept my desk for such private oath-taking pledges.  You would be amazed at just how well all of this worked.  I know I sounded like a used car salesman : “I’m going to have to take this offer to the boss and get him to sign off, but, if he agrees to this outrageous offer,  you had better make the payments Dude.  If you don’t, I’ll send Bruno, and he’ll break both of your arms and one of your legs.     You’ll die trying to get to the bus station.  And the hound doesn’t wait.” (You don’t work with CYA parolees, some of the slickest manipulators ever, without learning a thing or two.  Never make enemies of anyone if you can help it, especially if they know where you live.)

    But all of that would develop over time, as we discovered how to collect and access our best thinking.  You have to keep in mind that the CCC, even though it had roots in the old Civilian Conservation Corps, which looked a lot like the army, was a brand new enterprise.  As David Muraki put it to me as we stood in front of his house overlooking the river, talking about how to make it better, as we often did: “the CCC has barely reached its “pea-soup-stage of evolution.”    Anyway, back on that fateful day I decided it was time to just go for it, to test all of the hopeful rhetoric about youth development I was hearing but not seeing enough of…  To my mind the incident brought us to a crossroad:  either we would begin to move forward, or, as far as I was concerned, the CCC might as well choke to death on its own potential while still in the cradle!

            To be honest, it’s hard for me to imagine a person better suited to the task of testing the new center’s espoused youth development mission.  I’m not bragging—Peter Lewis would tell me years later that he was born to be The Backcountry Trails Coordinator, and I puffed up my chest, balled up my fists, and said to him:  “Oh yea.  Well I was more born for my job than you were to yours” Good and bad, pretty much all I had done up to this time was exactly relevant.   For starters, during the six years I worked as a probation officer in LA and Santa Clara Counties, I routinely completed exhaustive evaluations of my clients, spent hours talking to them, their families and people at the schools they attended. The profiles and recommendations I submitted to the court were distilled summaries meant to guide the judge’s decision.  The underlying questions were--given that Juvenile justice is based on finding what is in the best interests of the offender: Is this offender likely to repeat or commit other offenses?  Is he a danger to himself or others?  Is his home suitable and can his family provide sufficient support for his or her rehabilitation?  Will he follow a probation plan, and so on…  Bottom line:  how big a risk is this kid?  Can we take a chance?

    From my point of view of someone who had worked with a lot of seriously damaged kids, with extremely limited resources, the CCC, with all we had to work with, the residential setting, food, clothing, work, recreation, community, and a caring staff, was the goose that could lay the golden egg.  My old colleagues at LA’s Central Juvenile Hall and the conservation camp I worked at south of San Jose were green with envy when I told them about my job.   And the young people who washed up on the beach at Klamath were on the whole just wonderful.  Some were more wonderful than others, of course; some had the potential to be wonderful, but were in need of a good spiritual scrubbing and a small attitude adjustment,  but we had everything we needed to make it happen.  Better than the Marine Corps.  Better than the monasteries I have lived in.  Better than schools.  Better because the CCC was all of these things.  Like a series of Chinese boxes, a number of institutions exist inside of each other. But we didn’t know it then, and I doubt the CCC knows it now.

    In fact the powerful challenges I faced everyday working with damaged kids rested on top of my own struggles to get a toehold in my own life.  I spent most of my childhood living in the projects near what is now Gompers Junior High in San Diego.  When I was in elementary school it was the site of Cholas Elementary School.   The product of a broken home, I was always in trouble of some kind.  I was held back in the third grade.  By the time I was 16 I had spent more than two years at various juvenile detention facilities.  At 16 the vice principle called me into his office and told me I was no longer enrolled at Lincoln High.

I couldn’t keep a job, and so at 17 I joined the Marine Corps, because the Corps was the only service that would have me.   Of course I got into trouble there, too.  18, drunk and disorderly, resisting arrest, assault on a Military Policeman in a small village in Japan.  Fortunately I had earned the respect of the sergeants in my company.  I ran a 4 minute 11 seconds mile.  I could run all day and all night, and did.  I weighed 150 pounds and could easily bench press 200. Too bad I was such a fuck up.  Still performance mattered.  My platoon sergeant put in a good word to the Company’s First sergeant.  The First Sergeant talked to the Regimental Sergeant Major and he in turn talked to the Commanding Officer.

     I was as surprised as anyone:  I didn’t go to jail, and I wasn’t given a dishonorable discharge.  Instead I forfeited a month’s wages, which came to $108 after taxes; I was restricted to the base for 90 days.  After work I washed dishes and peeled potatoes.  On weekends I washed and waxed the battalion’s fleet of vehicles.   I had made a big mistake, potentially a mistake I couldn’t take back.  I don’t even want to think what would have become of me if these hard-ass marines didn’t have compassionate hearts.  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have seen 21.  I’m 72.  This stuff matters!

    So I know what breaks can mean for fuckups.  During the third year of my four year commitment to the Corps I was injured on a training exercise and therefore assigned to a job I could do:   driving ambulances in and around Camp Pendleton, from San Clemente to Torres Pines.  It was a 24 on and 24 off work schedule, which gave the time to take courses at  Oceanside Junior College.  I took courses in basic literacy, English fundamentals, math, biology and physics.  I got my GED the first time I took the test.  After that I really got into learning.  To support myself while I attended various college and universities I worked as a mechanic, drove charter and school buses, worked as a laborer for the steel company that built Charger Stadium.  I busted tires for Firestone, and sandblasted machine gun parts from midnight to 8am—anything to make study possible.

After I received two BAs I went to work for the Los Angeles County Probation Department.  After a year, I returned to my studies, and earned a Master’s degree in literature.  Would you believe the title of my thesis was “The Patterns of Loneliness in the Novels of Charles Dickens”--all those terrified children living in the squalor of London, desperately searching for a home, a warm hearth, someplace to be safe from a cruel, predatory capitalist system, which has so much in common with the feudal capitalist system of contemporary America.  I became a fully-fledged Marxist thinker.  And then, with my wife’s support,  we went off to England where I did an interdisciplinary PHD.  I had three supervisors: one in American literature, one in American history and one in the philosophy of literature and history.  What a trip that was.  I went to the library to discover the world.  I’m reminded of one of the writers I’ve kept at my elbow all these years, Henry David Thoreau:  “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.”

    To my surprise, after completing the PHD I was offered a lecturing position at North London University, where I taught English and American literature for seven years.  God what a stretch that was, standing in a lecture hall, with one hundred students expecting me to provide them with sufficient knowledge to pass the series of exams required to graduate.  I had great friendships with both students and staff.  And I loved living such an intellectual life.  Indeed, I had inculcated the traditions of western civilization.  I had become a classical scholar in the truest sense, for life.  Still, I confess the kid from the projects found it pretty scary, and somewhat sterile.  I never intended to be a professor.  I just loved learning for its own sake.  But now I wanted to find some way to use my experience and education to make a difference, and I knew it wasn’t going to be at a university.

    In fact the stress was awful and I always felt out of place, though, mind you, as I said,  there were some wonderful colleagues and students.  At the University of London, undergraduate students focused on a single subject.  For three years my students studied the history of English literature, from Beowulf to the present. The focus was on the text itself, not the world in which the text existed, what the text could tell us about history, the rise and fall of civilizations, the truths of the human heart, in short, nothing I cared about deeply.  The head of the school of English was shocked when I told him I was resigning and returning to the US where I would probably get back into the juvenile justice system in some capacity. 

    And then before washing up on the beach at Klamath I spent two years working for the CCC in LA, in the same inner-city neighborhoods where I had worked as a probation officer ten years before.  It sort of brought everything together for me.   And before that I had been a senior counselor for two years at a juvenile honor camp just south of San Jose.  Each evening I was faced with 100 youngsters sitting on their bunks waiting for me to figure out their evenings activities.  We played a lot of basketball, started a running club, watched movies and sat around a camp fire.  For some reason I quickly developed a style that was comfortable for me, a kind of warm, fireside manner that seemed to just turn down the volume and tone a bit.  It was great experience.  I was the fire training officer, and led crews on brushing and stream rehabilitation projects.  All of this was great training for what lay ahead.

    I guess I no longer remember how I first learned about the CCC.  (Don’t worry.  My memory is still good, but, unfortunately, it just isn’t always available.)  However, I do remember conversations I had with Bruce Saito, whom I would replace a year or so down the road, when the CCC, under budget demands, consolidated the non-residential center in south central Los Angeles with San Pedro residential Center. Shortly after the consolidation, Bruce left the CCC and he, along with Martha Depenbrok and supportive community leaders, created the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, where Bruce still arrives to work every day before dawn, plants trees on the weekends with corpsmembers, and thrives, as does the Los Angeles Conservation Corps.  Bruce was a great inspiration for me.  With nothing but determination and sweat Bruce and his team built a program that dwarfed the state program, despite all of the resources made available by the state.  By the way, the two corps operations are on the same street is south central; they both occupy abandoned city-owned firehouses, though Bruce’s local corps has spread all around the city.  “Local” is the word to describe the difference between the two operations.  LACC has a vibrant Board, made up of wheelers and dealers who know how to get money and make things happen.  Community member, moms and dads, aunts and uncles, are encouraged to come to the center to volunteer or just hang out, to make it feel like a family.  Why the CCC never saw the potential in LACC’s model surprises me.  It doesn’t cost anything to just act like a local corps.  You don’t have to be one to act like one.  (As a matter of fact it worked well for us at the Del Norte Center, when we inherited the management responsibilities for a non-residential center in Yreka, but that’s a later story.)

            Anyway hanging out with and being shown around by Bruce was thrilling.  I passed the CCC’s entrance exam, was offered a job in San Pedro, quit the Santa Clara County Probation Department, and moved back to San Pedro, where my wife had grown up and her mother and brothers still lived. 

            But San Pedro was such a disappointment.  While there were some good people there, the operation stunk.  Early on, I remember being directed to fire a corpsmember who had the gall to enter the dining room without any shoes.  The kid was brand new.  Evidentially he gave the cook a little backtalk, too. Big deal!  Yea, this was another cook who could dish it out but certainly couldn’t take it.  I objected, and told the center director that I couldn’t see how the “infraction” warranted termination.  “fire him,” he told me  “he’s going to be trouble down the road.”  I wouldn’t do it.  The director, whose qualifications were based on the time he had spent as a business manager in the Navy, was furious.  But he couldn’t win this one.  By any standard, his directive was arbitrary and capricious.  He was  going to look bad.

            I saw terrible things.  Most of the staff treated corpsmembers like they were defective human beings. Actually the C1s were afraid of their bosses, and because of the insulting relationship they had with corpsmembers they were afraid of them, too.  Bullies.  Bad morale and low self-esteem poisoned the place.  The average length of stay was less than four months.  It was so punishing, so toxic.

            It wasn’t long before I began to look for another job.  Apart from anything else, the center director wasn’t going to allow me to pass the one-year probation required to become a permanent employee.  I was a trouble maker, so I blew the whistle. I made sure the leadership in Sacramento knew what was happening at the San Pedro Center, which of course got back to the center director.  As it happened, the center director saw a great chance to get me fired.  With maybe two months of experience working as the center’s in-camp coordinator, facilities,  food services, education, discipline, etc., I was dispatched to a flood event at the Colorado River, near the Parker Dam.  Deep snow packs were pushing water over the banks of the Colorado River along a stretch of prime real estate.

            It was June.  There were 200 corpsmembers there from central and southern California. We slept on cots at the Parker Dam Elementary School.   It was pretty overwhelming.  I didn’t know anything.  The first day I visited with all of the crews, and spent as much time as I could standing in lines passing along sandbags we were placing to protect holiday resorts, private homes and local businesses.  They were long days: 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.   PT began at 5:30 each morning. The echoing canyon sounds of corpsmembers counting off were awesome.  I participated.  I stayed right there.

            My assistant on this incident was a C1 who was called Breeze for some reason.  He had been a corpsmember and he was very helpful, and so was Bruce Boniface, with whom I became a life-long friend.  It was simple:  I asked people about the process—what happens next?    Every evening I circled up with the C1s for a debriefing of the day:  what’s working, what’s not, how do we fix it, what do you need… And then I would go to the school’s gym where there was always a pick-up game of basketball in play.  B.T. Collins was right: it’s really hard, if not impossible, to work young people to death.

            So I listened and learned, and served.  And the operation was completely successful.  The Regional Deputy who probably came to the site to fire me was impressed with what he saw, except for our practice of hauling around 1000 pounds of sandbags on the roofs of the 15 passenger vans. 

            So then the two centers in Los Angeles were consolidated, my boss got replaced by Walt Hughes, who was promoted from his position at the south central site, where I was assigned.  It was yet another overwhelming assignment.  It was me, 50 corpsmembers and 2 C1s, and Cynthia Aguayo, a Crew Leader from Boyle Heights.  She was great.  She might have been 19, small and slight, but she sure was a big person!

            So it was just us, and Ms. Wilson, who was a Los Angeles City School teacher assigned to provide a high school program for our corpsmembers.  (Way to go Bruce.)  So I managed the place the best I could, served a relief supervisor, and did just whatever it took.  I loved the kids and staff there.  If anyone ever noticed that I was the only white guy around I never knew it.  What a contrast to my days as a probation officer, when almost every time I had to do something “unpleasant” it was “racial”.  And this was the 80’s; the “black is beautiful” was everywhere.  Small non-profit schools or academies were popping up everywhere; it was a beautiful to watch a community struggling to overcome its deeply damaged self-esteem.  But, at the same time, tragically, crack was rolling in like a toxic fog.  And, of course, the war on drugs quickly took the shape of a war on the victims.  And the symptoms got worse, and almost no one was looking at the deeper causes.  Crime, like illness, is very profitable. 

    I’m afraid the culture at the non-residential center had also been shaped by the CCCs  correctional culture, to; there was something of the same top- down and punishing culture I found at San Pedro.  But there was an awful lot that was good.  This was a place where I could work.  Early on I made it clear that the one thing I wouldn’t tolerate was treating these young men and women like they were convicts.  They weren’t, and I knew the difference.  But again the CCC was trapped in its corrections culture.  For example, if you came to work without a belt, you were sent home, docked and put on a contract.  Now me, I went out and bought some belts, which I rented out for $5.00 a day.    A little change like that can make a big difference.  “Come on guys.  We need to put some money in our community funds account.  Make a donation.   Do us a favor and leave your belt at home tomorrow.”  I mean whose side were we on?  Playing cops and robbers ain’t where its at.  Yea, how about we try to make decisions that are in the best interests of corpsmembers for a change.  They called it “tough love” but it was just bullshit.  But I don’t mean to be judgmental—too judgmental.  Staff and corpsmembers were playing with loser cards in a losing game.  But we began to change the game a little at a time, and the hands got better.

    It was a great learning situation for me:  I had Walt Hughes and Ardess Lilly acting as my mentors down there in San Pedro.  They were generous with their time, but they were so busy; they couldn’t have gotten that involved with the operation downtown if they wanted to.  However, they did support their poor stepchildren the best they could. But, For the most part, we were on our own.  Fortunately there were great projects and partnerships to be had in LA.  The entire center went on a tree planting, trail building spike on the Inyo National Forest, which was a great place to begin building a caring community.   We worked for the Forest Service in the Angeles National Forest.  We helped develop the William O’Donnel Outdoor School, worked for the Tree People, maintained trails for LA City Schools environmental center at Crystal Creek.  We built play grounds for local non-profit schools and academies throughout the area.  Education, children and conservation was a good focus for us.

             Life was good, but it was often difficult for the kids down at the CCC.  Every Monday morning I heard horror stories.  One Monday morning Samantha didn’t come in, which was totally unlike her;  her brother was found dead in a dumpster at Church’s  fried chicken place across the street.  We had high walls and rolls of sharp concertina wire on top of them; still we couldn’t keep chainsaws.  It got to the point where I loaded up the tools that were worth something, and took them home with me on weekends.  Crack had made it to the inner city.  During the day, the neighborhood felt good.  The fine people who lived there were out and about, doing good things in the world.  But when the sun went down they were forced inside, behind strong, triple-bolted doors, and barred windows, listening to the sounds of the jungle outside:  the flap, flap, flap of police helicopters, the crackling sounds of gunfire over the sound of their TVs.  A city under siege, the shock and awe of urban war, in Bagdad, Kabul, South Africa, Saigon, the feeling is much the same, I imagine. 

    But it was 1984 and the Olympics were coming to town, and we were in the forefront of getting the city ready.  There was a movement called something like “Beautify LA.”  We developed strong relationships with city Parks and Rec people (thanks Bruce).  This was a great opportunity for us.  We had a chance to go for a different kind of gold.  The city was hiring our kids.  Good, hard-working, reliable help is hard to find.  And then—I forget exactly how—a bunch of corpsmembers and I found ourselves enrolled in a horticulture class at the Southern Regional Occupation Center in Torrance.  Michael Hall was the teacher.  (Michael is Ned Alrich’s step dad.  Ned was at the beach fire.)  It was a difficult class.  We had to learn the Latin names of 100 plants, how to read fertilizer bags, evaluate soils, construct irrigation systems, and so on. 

    The next thing you know:  we’ve been asked to undertake massive landscaping projects at two prestigious botanical gardens, the South Coast Botanical Garden, and, would you believe, the prestigious Huntington Library.  It was perfect.  Michael was with us at the worksite teaching us in the process of getting stuff done.  Kinesthetic learning at its best.  Work/Learn:  learning how to work, working to learn, learning how to develop plans, learning how to work with others.  Learning how to learn.  It was great hands-on education. 

    Evidentially the Project Coordinator at Del Norte heard about the model we were developing, and Brad Duncan, who was to become a life-long brother of the open road, was taking a job at the C’s headquarters in Sacramento.  He called me and encouraged me to apply.  I did. I took this model to Del Norte, where my soon-to-be partner-in-crime, Dan, the coyote, Ferriera, was waiting for me.  At the top of our game there, corpsmembers routinely completed 20 college units in applied environmental technology, and many were earning certificates in the field.  With the right instructors we could build anything and did:  a Marine Mammal Center, a Youth Hostel, a book shop, etc.  And, with the help of instructors and sponsors who valued our partnership, at both the base center at Klamath and on our Backcountry Trails crews, we trained crews to a high professional level in the process of building enough trail to stretch half way to the moon.  (And more later)

            So I was pretty happy in LA, but I had virtually no time for my family.  There was just no end to it.  And then I got a call from Dan Ferreria .  So I drove 16 hours to look around and have an interview.  I immediately loved the place.  Man, if you couldn’t do the work of the lord here, you should just go soak your head in a bucket of water. 

    It was so different.  I camped out on the beach, and participated in the early morning PT.  What’s this, I thought, where are the staff?  And then I followed the corpsmebers up the magical stairs to breakfast.  You still couldn’t see a thing.  The kitchen was a clean, well-lighted place.  There was a lot of food and lots of choices.  The stuff corpsmembers had to make lunch was pretty good, too.

    After breakfast, it must have been around 7, I hiked down to the office.  Still no staff. It turned out that the last staff member routinely left at midnight, and a Crewleader was in charge of the center until around 7:30 the next day.  Wow.  After a while I wandered down to the garages under the abandoned Air Force apartments, where the vehicles were parked, backed up to the hot rooms.  Each crew had its own hot room.  The tool swamper had the keys.  Several  people from each crew were  preparing for the day ahead.  They were cleaning and sharpening tools, swamping vehicles and making sure everything was in order.  By now I knew just what it took and what it meant for a crew to roll out of the yard with the right tools and everything else squared away.  But where in the hell were the staff?

    While this was going on downstairs, upstairs, corpsmembers, who were assigned specific dorm duties in an effort to return their quarters to a decent condition.  Working in the mud and rain for 6 months of the year was hard on the place.  The field work was hard on corpsmembers too, hard on their uniforms.  Working with oily tools insured that every uniform was permanently stained.  The boots went bad in the wet weather, too.  In LA the floor of our fire station was waxed and buffed.  Corpsmembers wore shinny boots, and clean, pressed uniforms.  They assembled in nice straight, military hook lines.  This was all quiet different.

    I just sat down on some out-of the-way stairs and watched.  It was all happen’, all getting done.  I was much impressed then, and would become much more impressed as time went on, as I experienced just how hard working and dedicated these young people were.  Seriously, I have not ever seen anything like it.  The Del Norte crews were awesome.  The physical demands were at least equal to what had been demanded of me in the Marine Corps, which weren’t insignificant by any means.  Either way, I appreciated much more the accomplishments of the CCC.  Training to kill people, killing people, and wasting a nation’s resources for some dumb-ass reason, for Empire, for God and country, gold or oil, or whatever, isn’t, to my mind terribly productive.  Healing the land and giving young people really hard, heroic things to do, to the point that they know they’re pretty damn special, is much more to my liking.   Of course, after work there were the evening classes, GED prep, Conservation Awareness, and Career Development. 

    And so I got the job.  I had an interview with Patrick and Penny Walker, another member of a staff that was committed to making things better.

    I must say, it was difficult for me to leave LA.  I felt like a quitter.  But Del Norte had everything and more to do the work I wanted to be doing.  Still, for years after, I kept in touch with people who worked at the State’s unemployment office in Los Angeles.  (During these years EDD was the main pipeline for bringing young men and women, 18-23, into the program.) We even managed to get a them a video of our center to show people who might be interested in us.  I occasionally received phone calls, and occasions I would visit EDD offices to make presentations and pitch our center.  That’s where I met Terrance Johnson, who came up to me when he arrived in Klamath, shook my hand, and said:  “Remember me?  I told you I was coming.”

    David and Patrick supported the idea of a “multi-racial” center.  I mean, you want to talk about “citizenship” education or multi-culturist education or just bringing different kinds of people together because it’s a good and powerful thing to do:  we just rounded up a whole bunch of different kinds of people and put them in a brown paper sack as it were, shock it awhile and emptied them out: “Okay boys and girls, welcome to the America you often read but never see.”  And they just had to figure it out.  Where else in America were you likely to see something like this? 

    There were difficult times now and then, sure.  There was the time the players on the center’s basketball team only wanted to pass the ball to guys who looked just like them, which reflected a larger racial tension in our community at the time,  but after you get your ass kicked a couple of times,  passing the ball seems like a better option.  Obviously, in the close quarters of our world it didn’t take long before you saw the kids from Red Bluff and Yreka heading off to town with their brothers and sisters from Compton, the East side of San Jose, and Oakland. True, it was somewhat difficult to attract inner-city kids to the wilds of Del Norte County.  But a lot of great kids made the trip, like my dear friend Terrance Johnson.  If there was racial conflict in America, it was going to exist at the Del Norte.  Fortunately, we had the ability to really do something about it in our town.

    So maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that I’m not just full of shit, though I recognize a good case could be made.  But, be that as it may, I hope you have a better sense of who the guy was who was going to put the center to a tough test that particularly blue Monday.   I knew all of the young people involved.  And I didn’t intend to fire any of them.